This blog continues the discussion that we began with Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). In 2017, be on the lookout for the next book in this series: Defying the Odds: the 2016 Elections and American Politics.

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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Rush v. Huntsman

Jon Huntsman announced his candidacy today for the Republican presidential nomination, and he took a page from the book of the esteemed and the great Ronaldus Magnus. He went out there and made his announcement in front of the Statue of Liberty, and he's got a logo (a red rectangle with his name, "Jon Huntsman;" and then white with "JonHuntsman.com").* and somebody observed to me that it looks like a designer label that you might find in clothes. His logo does, his icon.

But it's interesting. I'll give you a little hint, a setup. He channels Ronaldus Magnus, does Huntsman. He basically says, "Look, we gotta go out there and we have to respect President Obama! I deeply respect President Obama. I am not going to run down anyone's reputation," and, by the way, the chattering classes both on our side and the left are going nuts here. I have a little media montage of the State-Run Media orgasmic over Huntsman making his announcement at the same place as Reagan frequently appeared. But it just illustrates exactly what we were talking about yesterday.

The Republican Party is still convinced that in order to secure the support of independents, that they have to be boring. They have to be serious and Milquetoast and cannot be confrontational, cannot be partisan, cannot go into attack mode. Somehow this is going to cause the independents to get nervous and send them running right back to Obama. Now, of course, that's flat-out BS, it's totally wrong. The elections of last November demonstrate that in a real world, real life example. But then there's also this. We're told -- and this is a trap, by the way, the left puts this out. It's designed to get us to be boring. It's designed to get us not to contrast ourselves with the left.

Actually the website is jonhunstmanjr.com, which redirects to www.jon2012.com. The website jonhuntsman.com belongs to somebody who opposes Huntsman, as Holly Bailey explained earlier this year:

Jon Huntsman may be staffing up ahead of a potential 2012 run, but President Obama's soon-to-be-ex ambassador to China apparently forgot about one very important task for any likely presidential candidate: Buying his own web domain name.

The letter is posted against a pink backdrop dotted with light pink hearts. Meanwhile, whoever is behind the page also created a heart graphic for the site modeled after Obama's 2008 campaign logo.

According to WHOIS, the directory of web domain owners, someone anonymously purchased the domain in late January--weeks after Huntsman put out word that he was considering running for the GOP nomination in 2012.